Israel claims to have recovered the body of Mohammed Sinwar, the alleged Hamas leader, from a tunnel in Gaza.

The Israeli military said Sunday it had located and identified the remains of Mohamed Sinwar, the alleged leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas in Gaza, three weeks after his death in a bombing raid was announced.

"The body of Mohamed Sinwar was found in the underground tunnel under the European Hospital in Khan Younis ," the Israeli military said in a statement, adding that Sinwar, the brother of the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, was killed on May 13.

During a visit to Gaza organized for the international press, the Army showed a video of the tunnel. Efe news agency attended the event, and this is the account.

At the entrance to the hospital's emergency room, which was evacuated due to the Israeli offensive in mid-May, Israeli soldiers were moving around a hole in the ground leading down to what they claim is a network of tunnels belonging to the Islamist group Hamas.

"We found, under the hospital, right under the emergency room, a complex of several rooms, and in one of them we found... we killed Mohammed Sinwar. We can prove it now," army spokesperson Effie Defrin explained to a small group of media members who were allowed access to the tunnel in the Palestinian enclave, where Israel has not allowed journalists to enter for 20 months.

The military spokesman confirmed that troops also found "a large quantity of ammunition, weapons caches, and money" throughout the underground network.

Upon entering the very narrow, low tunnels, which forced some of the group to bend their heads as they walked, a pungent odor and flies permeated the air at all times. Some walls were stained with blood.

About 200 meters from the entrance that leads, according to the military, to one of the Islamists' longest tunnels, the Army showed the press one of the rooms used by the group.

In the room, at least three mattresses, a stool, garbage, and several pieces of fabric stained with blood were seen lying on the floor.

Images released Sunday afternoon by the armed forces, captured before the visit with the media, show two bodies lying on mattresses in that same room.

Asked by Efe , the Army did not identify whether the bodies corresponded to Sinwar or the leader of Hamas's Khan Yunis Brigade, Mohammed Sabaneh, who also died as a result of Israeli attacks on the area.

Defrin confirmed that the army has already conducted DNA tests on Sinwar's body to identify him. However, they have no results yet for Sabaneh's body, as well as for other Hamas members present in the tunnel.

Hamas, for its part, asserted in a statement that the initial footage Israel released of the tunnel, in which troops entered it by descending a vertical pipe, was "weak" and "poorly crafted."

"Rather, the analysis indicates that the occupation forces were the ones who excavated the land and installed the pipeline, and then filmed a dramatic scene near the hospital's emergency room," the statement said.

According to Israeli media, an Israeli army airstrike on May 13 in Khan Yunis, in the south of the Gaza Strip, targeted Mohamed Sinwar, brother of Yahya Sinwar, the former Hamas supreme leader who was killed in Gaza in October 2024.

Yahya Sinwar is considered the main architect of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which triggered the war in Gaza.

According to experts on the Islamist movement, Mohamed Sinwar led Hamas's armed branch, the al-Qassam Brigades, which, like the political movement, is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and the European Union.

Experts therefore consider it likely that the position fell to Yahya Sinwar's younger brother, Mohamed, whom Hamas placed in charge of the hostages taken to Gaza after the October attack.

Mohamed was born on September 15, 1975. He rarely appeared in public or spoke to the media . His family was among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled the Nakba, or catastrophe, during the birth of Israel during the 1948 war and settled in the Gaza Strip.

According to the Hindustan Times, he joined Hamas shortly after the militant group's founding in 1987, and his reputation as a "hardliner" helped him rise through the ranks, leading the Khan Younis Brigade, one of the organization's strongest units, which led the cross-border attack and kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2006, who was held captive for five years and exchanged for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

The Israeli army believed it had killed the young Sinwar in 2014, but discovered he had survived. In late 2023, the Israeli army announced on social media that it had raided his office at a Hamas military post and training complex in Gaza, where military doctrine documents were found.

Hamas sources told Reuters that Mohamed Sinwar played a central role in the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, planned by his late brother.

He is believed to have spent much of the war underground to escape Israeli airstrikes. However, in recent months, he had been seen above ground in Khan Yunis, including at Nasser Hospital, according to a Middle Eastern intelligence official, the New York Times reported.